Bailiff Flooding.

About Bailiff Bridge

Bailiff Flooding.Anybody coming to the village from all directions excluding Brighouse will notice one thing? It’s all downhill and all the fields and contributory small roads all lead downhill to the centre of the village this along with the Bailiff Bridge Beck that runs through the centre of the village, it will come to no surprise to most of you that all this water leads to one thing ‘FLOODING’ and until recently this was the case for hundreds of years in fact, if you look at all these properties in the centre of the village they have one common factor in all there construction that is they all have very high steps leading to the doors of the properties, these properties were built in this way to try and keep the flooding water at bay and some of these properties have amazing high steps that make it very difficult for both the elderly and very small children to gain access to these properties, the old wooden former paper shop built on the edge of the beck on Victoria Road has one very high step (now rebuilt in brick) and the Post office has several that can be a struggle when some elderly people come to collect their pensions.

The former Punch Bowl Hotel suffered more than most with it having a beer cellar where they would often see the beer barrels floating around the cellar. Several years ago the Rivers Authority made some changes to the beck on the Clifton side of Bailiff that improved the flow of the beck, even when the beck looks more like a raging river it seems to cope these days and in recent years only the properties that have cellars (like the Punch Bowl Hotel) seem to still have problems with flooding, in past years it was a common sight in the village for the beck to flow so rapid and high that it caused the drains in the road to become escape outlets and to see 10 foot high fountains coming from these drains which were both spectacular and frightening, the beck now has electronic monitor sensor fitted to the upright on the first bridge at the corner of Victoria Road and Wakefield Road this monitor sends readings to the rivers authority through a telephone connection of the becks height and hopefully flooding can now be avoided.

The Steep Hills and Land that almost surrounds the village bring large quantities of water to the heart of the village leading to the beck becoming swollen at times.